Last Girl Standing

by Lisa Jackson

  “Gimme that,” she said, putting a hand out for her Glock.

  “Is it loaded?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wow. You really carry a gun.” He handed it back to her, almost reluctantly. The glove box was open, and he glanced inside. “Is that your journal?”

  Bailey took the gun back. “Yep.” She put the gun in the box and snapped it closed.

  “No shit. Can I see it?”

  “No.”

  “You want to make love again?”

  She tried to focus on him. It was difficult. He seemed remarkably sober all of a sudden. “I gotta figure out whad ta do already.”

  “You mean, like the morning-after pill? Hey, maybe we’re making a baby. Would that be so bad?”

  “You’re nuts, Penske.”

  “You got any handcuffs?”

  “Left ’em at the station. We’re here . . . the reune . . . the reune,” she tried to explain.

  “You’re really messed up.” He laughed. “How much did you drink?”

  “You know . . . you . . .”

  But then he was kissing her, and she was passing out.

  I need help. . . was her last thought.

  * * *

  Delta looked at the clock. 1:00 a.m.

  She lay in the bed beside her husband, who was snoring to beat the band—the same song that always played when he drank too much. She’d left the drapes open and cracked the window, and outside a shy three-quarter moon was playing hide-and-seek behind trails of wispy clouds. When the clouds would disappear, the view of their backyard and Owen’s play structure—mostly constructed for use when he was older—was thrown into sharp relief.

  She threw back the covers after a few more minutes when she realized she would never fall asleep. It was still fairly early, anyway. Tanner had just gone deep with the drinks and flamed out early, while she’d come home and relieved her mother from babysitting duty, then made herself a cup of chamomile tea. She hadn’t drunk enough wine to feel the effects, but she’d ended up with a blasting headache anyway. She’d then looked in on Owen, who slept on his stomach with his legs tucked in and his little butt pushed upward, one arm slung around his favorite stuffed dog, Doggie. She’d tried to keep him sleeping on his back, as recommended, but once he’d found he could flip over, that was the way he stayed, no matter how many times she tried to put him on his back again. This time, she checked his breathing and determined he was fine.

  She’d been half-asleep when Tanner stumbled in, declaring loudly, “You left me,” as he moved into their en suite bath, as if it had been some kind of surprise. Or maybe it was a rebuke that she’d taken the car and forced him to find another way home. When he climbed into bed and threw an arm over her and promptly fell asleep, she picked up his limp hand and flung it away from herself. Sleep had eluded her after that, so that was the first time she’d tiptoed down the hall and peeked into Owen’s room. She settled him on his back that time as well, only to watch him snuggle into his favorite position, with his legs tucked under and his butt upward.

  Her love for her husband might have faded away, but her love for her son was monumental. Mega-fierce. All she lived for.

  Now she asked herself: Could she imagine a world without Tanner but with Owen? Would Tanner even allow it? He professed to love Owen, and did, probably, as best he could, given that all love was a diluted emotion for Tanner Stahd.

  But could she do it . . . manage without him?

  The thought of just her and Owen was heady indeed.

  She wished Tanner was just gone.

  Dreamily, she thought about how convenient it would be if Tanner should die. Poof, gone, leaving her with his business and, most of all, Owen, with free rein to rear him any way she chose.

  There was a scratch pad on the end of the kitchen counter near the door to the garage. Her eye fell on it, and she picked it up. A moment later, she searched through the junk drawer next to the stove for a pen. She found one that advertised Woody’s Auto Body.

  Sitting back down, she thought for a moment, then wrote:

  She wanted him dead. It was much simpler than divorce, much cleaner, and she would end up with so much more than if they had to split up what they owned together. She thought about poison, or a drug overdose, but that seemed much too risky. Too traceable. An accident of some kind would be best. He owned a gun, though he didn’t keep it loaded now that they had a child, a little boy named . . . Zachary . . . but no one knew he’d taken the bullets out. He kept the gun at work, in a hiding place in his desk. If the nurses and receptionist at the clinic knew of it, they kept their mouths shut.

  She planned his murder. Every day, every moment when she was awake, she planned and planned and planned. And every day that went by just convinced her more that he had to go. Her anger grew as she plotted. A gun didn’t seem like the right weapon. She wanted to bash him over the head with a candlestick . . . the fireplace poker . . . the baseball bat he still revered from his long-ago days in Little League.

  Delta sat up and looked at the words, scratching out the candlestick and fireplace poker. Too old-time melodramatic. She moved into Tanner’s office—her office, where she did all the bookkeeping, but they called it his, naturally—and opened the laptop on the desk, quickly inserting what she’d just written into the word-processing program.

  But as her rage grew, so did her impatience and a sense of macabre need for pain.

  And one day, while she was cutting up an apple, the knife slipped and nicked her finger. Blood oozed up in a perfect, circular drop. She sucked on her finger and looked at the knife and dreamed.

  Scrolling back up to the top of the page, she wrote: Blood Dreams by Delta Smith-Stahd.

  * * *

  Bailey was being pulled along the ground, her bare heels scraping on the tarmac. She tried to lift her head, but it was more than she could accomplish. She couldn’t understand what was happening.

  Penske . . . Penske was dragging her around the outside of the car.

  It was late. Dark. Cold. No other cars around in the lot.

  “Whad’re ya doin’?” she mumbled.

  “Helping you.”

  He propped her against the car, where she sank into a heap. She blinked a few times until the parking lot, the trees beyond, the back of Lundeen’s, all came back into focus.

  She slowly found the strength to get to her feet, leaning hard against the car, staring down at her bare feet. “Where’re my shoes?” She cleared her throat. She felt better, sharper. “What the hell, Penske?”

  “Here. Put ’em on.”

  Her shoes were on the ground. She slid one foot into one, and then the other, moving carefully. She still felt weird, as if her body was someone’s else’s. “Somebody spiked my drink,” she said with more certainty.

  “I did,” he said. “I wanted to have sex with you.”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t think you’d go for it, so I gave you a little something.”

  “Jesus . . . You shit! You can’t . . .” She broke off, her building fury melting away as she realized he had her Glock in his hand and was pointing it at her.

  “I read your journal while you were out,” he said. “Don’t scream. I’ll shoot you.”

  “What?” Bailey was in pure shock.

  “We’ve been worried about you for years. About what Carmen might have told you. About what she saw.”

  “She . . . didn’t . . . she . . .”

  He looked past her, and she started to turn around, see what he was looking at. There were footsteps and—

  Blam!

  The shot hit her dead center in the chest.

  Blam! Blam!

  Twice more.

  She smelled the cordite, felt the impact, the bursting pain, saw Penske rushing toward her as she fell forward onto the concrete, smacking her head.

  “Took you long enough,” she heard him say as he glared at the newcomer. “Thought I was going to have to fuck her again.” Then, “Hey! Stop! Shit!”
<
br />   Blam!

  Penske’s body folded in on itself, and he collapsed beside her.

  She stared into his blue eyes, full of stunned surprise.

  The gun blasted twice more, and Penske’s body jumped with each shot.

  And then she knew no more.

  PART FOUR

  The Unraveling

  Chapter 14

  Tanner Stahd’s been stabbed and is fighting for his life, McCrae thought in disbelief.

  That fact still felt unreal, though McCrae had been called to the scene of the clinic stabbing and had spent most of last night processing the scene. After a quick few hours of sleep, he was now heading in to the station.

  Twenty-four hours earlier, the day had started out fairly benignly, with a weak sun shining through McCrae’s kitchen window, causing his dog, Fido, to move from one warm square of light to another before the sun slid behind some serious rain clouds. By evening, the day had been shattered by the news that there had been a stabbing at the Stahd Clinic, devolving further when the victim was learned to be Tanner himself. Not since Bailey Quintar’s death had McCrae felt so uncertain and angry. Bailey’s death, along with Justin Penske’s, was never far from his consciousness, as it was for probably every one of their classmates who’d been at the reunion that night. It was in the forefront of his boss’s, Bob Quintar’s . . . Quin’s . . . as well, but their hands had been tied from the get-go in any effort to investigate their homicides; Bailey’s and Penske’s deaths had been ruled a murder/suicide by the special investigator, who’d swept in and taken over the case.

  Now McCrae stood in today’s same weak sunlight with a cup of reheated coffee. He drew a long breath and thought back to the night before. Delta had been there, her dress bloodstained, as she stood by Tanner’s crumpled body. For a moment, McCrae had thought he was dead, but the ambulance had screamed in a few moments later and taken Tanner to the hospital. After taking her statement, McCrae had seen Delta to the hospital himself, then had gone back to the clinic and made sure, along with two of the four officers on staff at the West Knoll PD, that everything was secure for the night. The tech team was coming this morning to gather what evidence was on scene.

  McCrae didn’t know how to feel about this attack on an old classmate. What had happened? Had Delta stabbed him? That seemed impossible, but until they learned something different, she would be near the top of the suspect list, if not actually at the top.

  Fido gave up his sun-worshipping snooze to trot to where McCrae was standing, his tail sweeping the battered hardwood floor of the three-bedroom ranch he’d inherited from his father. Fido was a black-and-white, long-haired, medium-sized mutt with one blue eye and one brown. He’d been whining piteously the morning McCrae had entered Bailey’s apartment following her murder and had had an accident in her kitchen. McCrae had taken the dog outside for another brief potty visit, and after Fido relieved himself, he’d cleaved hard to McCrae’s side. The dog knew him from the times Bailey had brought him into the station. He’d attached himself to McCrae as if they’d always been together, even though the animal was clearly confused about what had happened to his mistress. McCrae’s chest had been tight as he’d recalled how he’d given Bailey a whole lot of grief about naming her dog Fido. He’d sworn that he would steal the dog away from her and change its name, but when Fido’s care was transferred to him, the name stood.

  Bailey.

  Pouring the remains of his coffee down the sink, McCrae felt the age-old pain of losing her once more. The attack on Stahd brought it all back. Five years since her death, and it was as fresh as ever. At the time, he and Bailey had both been working their way toward detective, but her killing had made it so that he was the only one able to reach that goal. It was decided that Bailey’s and Penske’s deaths were the result of a murder/suicide, but Quin had never been able to accept that theory, and neither had McCrae. Supposedly, Penske had shot Bailey in the heat of passion; there was ample evidence they’d had sex in the back seat of her car. The theory was they were both drunk, an argument had ensued that had culminated in Penske shooting her outside of the car, and then, in the next moment, consumed with shock and grief, he’d turned her gun on himself. The department had brought in Timothy Hurston, an outside investigator who, despite arriving with glowing credentials, had considered it a lover’s quarrel gone nuclear. Statements had been taken from bar patrons, but no one knew anything apart from the fact that Bailey and Penske had been getting pretty friendly with each other before they left together.

  The problem was, it just didn’t ring true for Bailey. Dead drunk? Sex in the back seat of her car? Penske with her handgun? Something was off.

  Penske and Bailey weren’t even an item before the night of the reunion. Bailey would have told him.

  McCrae had argued that they needed a deeper dive into Bailey’s death, which Quin had fervently agreed with. But the powers that be had felt Quin was too unstable to know and ordered him to go on paid administrative leave for nearly six months before bringing him back and eventually moving him up to West Knoll’s chief. McCrae’s arguments had been ignored for the same reason: he was Bailey’s classmate, friend, and coworker and therefore was too close to the case. He’d been forced to curb his desire to correct what he perceived as justice gone wrong, but he’d never forgotten. He’d spent long hours secretly delving into Bailey’s death, even if the department considered it a closed case. Two pieces of information stuck out as important to follow up on: one, the bartender on duty at Lundeen’s the night of Bailey’s death, who had allowed interviews with the special investigator and had offered up that Penske had been pushing Bailey to drink, quit his job three weeks after the homicide and disappeared into the ether; and two, Bailey’s journal was missing. Quin had made a big fuss about the journal, had said she sometimes kept it in her car, but no amount of searching had turned it up. Quin had told anyone who would listen that his daughter had written down notes on crimes, which had, a number of times, helped catch the perpetrators, and that she’d also begun the journal after the death of her closest friend, Carmen Proffitt, a death Bailey felt had not fully been an accident. The special investigator had quizzed Quin long and hard on the journal as Quin was the only one besides Bailey who’d seen her notes, but he’d been unable to give any information that could be construed as conclusive, and therefore that line of inquiry was dropped.

  McCrae, like Quin, knew how much that journal had been a part of Bailey, and how much Bailey had believed Carmen’s death was due to unnamed forces and pressures. McCrae had never really accepted Bailey’s theories; she’d damn near blamed everyone at the barbeque for Carmen’s death. But why had Penske killed her? Had Bailey learned something about him that had harkened back to Carmen? The special investigator had intimated that McCrae was just looking for something or someone to blame when he posed the question to him.

  “You’re looking for zebras when there are just horses,” Timothy Hurston had said, with that superior smirk that McCrae had wanted to smack from his supercilious face. Instead, he’d begun his own underground investigation, which Quin understood and secretly encouraged. Bailey’s father had never gotten over feeling that more could be done, and McCrae had worked behind the scenes, mostly on his own time, trying to trace the bartender, James Carville. By coincidence, he’d just discovered a solid lead on the man’s current whereabouts when Delta’s call came through about the attack on Tanner.

  His first thought had been: Are the two crimes related? How could they be?

  His second: How could they not be?

  Now he’d had time to think that over. Maybe he was seeing zebras instead of horses. Maybe Bailey’s death was unrelated. A romantic, alcohol-fueled interlude gone horribly wrong? Or maybe it had something to do with her being a cop? Penske, it turned out, had once had a relationship with Nia Crassley, the youngest Crassley daughter, who may very well have been underage at the time. No one was saying for sure, especially not Nia, but Bailey, who’d tried for years to corral the
Crassley miscreants, might have learned something that drove the last nail in Penske’s coffin, forcing him to kill her to hide his secrets. Or maybe one of the Crassleys was involved with Penske in a setup to kill Bailey. McCrae had tried to talk to them, preferably alone, though the Crassleys preferred to face the cops as a group. They’d either laughed their asses off at his theories or acted like they were all deaf, dumb, and blind.

  One of the Crassleys had trapped Bailey in an alley once, determined to show her what it meant to be with a real man, but Bailey had wriggled her way out of that one with a swift knee to his groin and a couple sharp elbows to his neck. Grudges were held. But time had taken care of that particular Crassley. Little Dan, who was six-three and about three hundred pounds, had gotten himself shot in a road-rage confrontation in eastern Oregon where the man he’d flipped off on one of those long, empty two-lane highways had chased him down in his truck, run him off the road, and put a bullet in his massive belly.

  Little Dan had not survived.

  But there were a helluva lot of other Crassleys who were still around who didn’t much like the law and who remembered how Bailey had gotten the best of their dear, departed brother.

  McCrae had posited that maybe there was more to Bailey’s and Penske’s deaths than met the eye, had gone at the Crassleys himself, but none of the higher-ups had been interested in listening to him, so McCrae had been forced to leave things alone. The DA had gone with Hurston’s murder/suicide theory all the way, and no charges were brought against anyone else. Bailey Quintar had been murdered, one of their own, and there was sadness and a thirst for revenge, but her killer was dead, too. That was the prevailing theory and answer, and there was nothing more to be investigated. It was Justin Penske who killed her. All by himself. No Crassleys or anyone else involved.

  Convenient that Penske couldn’t answer any questions . . .

  Fido had a dog door that McCrae had cut into his back door. It was big enough for the dog and maybe a very small person or child, which could be an issue if someone really wanted to get at him, but they would have to deal with the dog first, and Fido had grown territorial since Bailey had disappeared from his life. He guarded McCrae’s house as if it were Fort Knox, and though he was polite when people were over, he wasn’t willing to be won by a stranger just because they chortled and giggled over his name, like that made him cuddly or something. Fido didn’t trust anyone, and getting past his defenses took years. McCrae’s last girlfriend had lasted less than a year, and she and Fido had had a healthy respect for each other, but that was as far as it went.